Abstract
HIPPOCRATES, in a famous passage, said that in forming a judgment on the outcome of illness not only the individual nature of the patient but also his environment, physiological and psychological, must be considered. This formed the text for a Chadwick Public Lecture delivered on February 23 by Prof. M. Greenwood, who suggested practicable lines of study for the medical student. In the first place, some knowledge of the housing position of England and Wales, as it was and is, is necessary. It is easy to forget that, in some parts of the country, the housing position is still very bad, and that rehousing schemes have not always been successes. In the next place, although scientific study of the influence of occupation on health is hundreds of years old, the earlier work was mainly devoted to specific occupational hazards, the noxious dusts and fumes. More general work on environmental effects is a generation old, but has been greatly neglected in education. Evidence of this is that at the beginning of the present war, and indeed still, the work of the Health of Munition Workers Committee and its successor, the Industrial Health Research Board, has been very largely ignored. One reason for this is that medical students and practitioners, overburdened by the demands of an ever-lengthening curriculum, have neither the training nor the leisure to study papers often of a technical character written by research workers who are usually not members of the medical profession. To prepare the way for improvement it is desirable that all medical students should receive an elementary training in statistical method. Both epidemiology and general social hygiene, because they are concerned with groups rather than individuals, must employ methods of averaging, that is, statistical methods. It is also necessary that more serious attention should be paid to the study of psychology.
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Social and Industrial Environment and Disease. Nature 151, 275 (1943). https://doi.org/10.1038/151275a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/151275a0